The U.S. Naval Academy has maintained a 50-50 split between military and civilian professors since 1845. That 180-year tradition is now under attack from a defense secretary who holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard but resigned from the Army National Guard as a major.
Pete Hegseth’s campaign against academic influence in the military has accelerated since he took office in January 2025. His latest target: the 300 civilian professors who teach future Navy and Marine Corps officers at Annapolis, even as 80 percent of all military officers receive their education at civilian universities.
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The Naval Academy Purge
Navy Secretary John Phelan sent a memo in July 2025 ordering a review board to eliminate 60 civilian professors and expand permanent military faculty from 40 to at least 100. Phelan, a private equity investor with zero military experience, wants military officers leading every academic department, including humanities.
“Divest from the civilian university modeling emphasis,” Phelan wrote, adding that the changes would “ensure merit-based scholarship opportunities complement the warrior ethos.”
The memo contained a grammatical error. It called for programs that “promote fitness standards, maritime skills and marksmanship as essential component of the warrior ethos.” Component should be plural.
By fall 2025, some professors had already left. Others started job hunting. Former Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, who graduated from Annapolis in 1983 and served 22 years in uniform, called the plan damaging.
“Why mess with something that’s worked so effectively for so long?” Del Toro said. “Some of our very best warfighters around the globe were trained with this model in mind.”
Del Toro added that strategic thinking comes from a well-rounded education, something civilian educators excel at teaching. The Air Force Academy is moving in the same direction.
Banning the Brass from Aspen
Hegseth pulled all senior Pentagon officials from the Aspen Security Forum one day before it started in July 2025. The forum has hosted Republican and Democratic defense officials for over a decade. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served under George W. Bush, co-chairs the event.
Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson said the forum “promotes the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country, and hatred for the President of the United States.”
Scheduled speakers included Mark Esper, who served as Trump’s defense secretary, and retired Army General David Petraeus, who commanded forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the department wouldn’t “legitimize an organization that has invited former officials who have been the architects of chaos abroad and failure at home.”
The Aspen Institute responded that invitations remain open. “For more than a decade, the Aspen Security Forum has welcomed senior officials from both parties,” the organization said.
The Princeton Paradox
Hegseth graduated as valedictorian from his Minnesota high school in 1999. Princeton University offered him admission, and he chose it over West Point to play basketball. He graduated in 2003 with a degree in politics after serving as publisher of The Princeton Tory, the conservative student newspaper.
During his time at Princeton, Hegseth wrote that the university should “defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity.” He joined Army ROTC months before September 11, 2001.
After brief stints at Bear Stearns and in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Hegseth enrolled at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He graduated with a Master of Public Policy in 2013. By 2022, he was on Fox News writing “return to sender” on his Harvard diploma.
His military career ended at major, a mid-level rank. Officers at that grade typically lead companies or serve as staff officers. They don’t set military strategy or command combat operations.
What the Critics Say
Eliot Cohen, who served as counselor to the State Department under Condoleezza Rice, wrote an August 2025 article for The Atlantic titled “Hegseth’s Headlong Pursuit of Academic Mediocrity.”
“The Army, unlike Princeton and Harvard, knew a petulant, insecure mediocrity when it saw one,” Cohen wrote. He noted that Hegseth “seems determined to bar academics or anyone who faintly resembles one from contact with the armed forces.”
Cohen pointed out a problem with the Naval Academy plan. If civilian professors corrupt military values, then the 80 percent of officers who attend civilian colleges through ROTC programs are equally compromised. “The implication is that the Pentagon’s leaders believe that four out of five commissioned officers are unfit for service,” he wrote.
Research backs up Cohen’s concerns. A December 2025 article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings cited studies showing that college faculty rarely change students’ political views. The Naval Academy needs civilian faculty because the military doesn’t produce enough officers with doctoral degrees to fill teaching positions.
The article noted that most future officers will serve alongside personnel who attended civilian schools. Removing exposure to different perspectives during their education could hurt their ability to lead diverse forces.
The Officer Pipeline
Here’s the math that makes Hegseth’s reforms puzzling. The service academies commission roughly 20 percent of new military officers. ROTC programs at state universities, Ivy League schools, and hundreds of other civilian institutions produce the rest.
Those ROTC cadets take classes from the same civilian professors Hegseth wants removed from Annapolis. They study the same humanities courses. They’re exposed to the same “globalist” ideas that supposedly weaken the warrior ethos.
But the military has no plans to shut down ROTC. It can’t. The academies don’t graduate enough officers to staff the armed forces.
Military officers who want to become permanent professors at the academies need doctoral degrees. They earn those degrees at civilian universities, often studying under the same faculty members Hegseth criticizes. Cohen noted that “military graduate students plunge enthusiastically into academic life and often wish to linger there.”
Where This Leads
The reforms represent the most significant shift in military education policy in decades. No defense secretary in recent memory has targeted the intellectual foundations of officer development with this level of hostility.
Princeton produced the defense secretary who now questions whether Princeton produces capable officers. Harvard educated the official who claims Harvard poisons military minds. And a man who topped out at major wants to restructure how the military trains generals and admirals.
The historical irony runs deeper. The Naval Academy’s model has worked since before the Civil War. It survived World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, and two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan. The officers it produced won those wars or prevented them.
Now the military is betting that less intellectual diversity will produce better leaders. The generals stayed quiet. Hegseth’s headlong pursuit of academic mediocrity continues, and the institution he leads appears unwilling to stop it.
